Mastodawn

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

I tend to claim every single free Epic and Amazon game each time they come up, but it’s not often one catches my eye enough to play. Arrangers, though, looked somewhat different and just happened to arrive when I was between games, and so here we are.

It’s a puzzle game, mostly, where you move by sliding the floor as if it is made of tiles. You know, like those slidey jigsawy picture puzzles you can get. Some items and characters on the same row or column as you also slide with you, and others don’t. Things sometimes “loop” left/right or up/down as well. Initially, most puzzles are just simple navigate-the-room-like-this type, but as you progress you have to move things around, fight baddies, and trigger switches using the same mechanics.

The plot for the game involves you finally plucking up courage to leave the village you have lived in since being found as a baby to try and track down your people. Your only real clue being the symbol on your clothing and, well, your weird movement. Leaving the village means braving the outside world and the “static” – a force which causes things to… get stuck – which becomes increasingly pertinent to the story as the games goes on.

In some ways, the puzzling is a bit like sokoban, only instead of moving the crates you effectively move everything else. I found that when I got stuck, which wasn’t that often, it was because I’d temporarily forgotten one of the core, simple, rules of how the game works, like you can move off the left of a row to appear on the right, or that you can essentially “drag” items behind you from a distance. Other than that, there wasn’t anything too tricky to deal with, although a couple of boss fights were a bit fiddly.

#completed #epicGames #steamDeck

deKay Jun 10

deKay May 19

Trees Inc (Steam Deck): COMPLETED!

If I were to describe this game it would sound very much like it was the same as Timber Rush, which I also played recently. And, I suppose it is. Trees Inc is a cookie clicker type game where you chop trees, get money for chopping trees, and spend that money to chop faster, get more money, and buy helpers to chop on your behalf. So yes, it’s the same game.

Well, not quite. It looks a lot more basic, and you grow different types of trees rather than just have one tree, and you have to wait for them to re-grow (although helpers and upgrades can speed that up). Oh, and you unlock different seasons that have different modifiers (like things grow slower or there are lightning storms) that you can swap between. But it’s still a clicker game about trees. And it was pretty good.

#completed #steam #steamDeck